Not many would probably object to the assertion that the goals of establishing a justice system most likely include:

• punishing the offenders of the laws, and
• preventing creation of new victims by potential future offenders.

These goals are achieved by investigating, prosecuting, convicting, and ultimately enforcing a properly cast sentence on the the offender. Of the above two goals, the main one that protects the interests of a society is the second one, and the first one is really only a requirement for enabling the other one. Punishing individuals with the sole purpose of punishing them does not sound very justifiable, even if those individuals are indeed criminals.

The punishment is only meant to play the role of a deterrent, to prevent future crimes and offenses; otherwise, a healthy modern society is not likely to find the very act of punishing individuals a noble or enjoyable one. If anything, societies with higher regard to the roots of people’s behaviors in human psychology, might consider acts of crime as side effects of mental illnesses, and hence give a genuine try to treat and cure criminals rather than punishing them by locking them up in prisons, or worse.

But even ignoring the more idealistic scenario described in the previous paragraph, limiting the goals or responsibilities of a justice system to just the above two items will miss out on a third major objective. That a justice system should be designed such that it itself does not create new victims by wrongfully prosecuting and punishing innocent individuals. While the first two objectives mentioned above are mostly inline with each other, this last one is actually an opposing objective, and plays the role of a brake in an otherwise merciless and overreaching system of finding and punishing offenders of the laws.

In systems with opposing missions like the one described above, it is usually not possible to satisfy all objectives with 100% accuracy. In the above example, if the justice system tries to find and punish all perpetrators, it would probably have to overreach and prosecute any suspect, even with the faintest evidence, only to make sure that it does not miss out on even a single perpetrator. And since it is unlikely to have an error-free system of courts and trials, it is very likely that it will end up punishing many who are indeed innocent. On the other hand, if the justice system tries to make sure that the third objective is satisfied with 100% accuracy, it has to be extra cautious and prosecute only suspects against which there is undeniable evidence, and further convict them only if that evidence is convincing to not just one person (e.g., a judge), but a group of independently minded individuals from different sectors of the society. This high bar is likely going to be limiting in the sense that the justice system may miss out on prosecuting and punishing some perpetrators, only to make sure that it is not wrongfully punishing an innocent individual.

So, these opposing objectives should somehow be balanced. This is like solving an optimization problem with two objective functions that are not simultaneously optimized in the same direction. A typical approach in such situations is to form a new objective function that is a combination, e.g., a weighted average, of the two original objective functions. And selecting those weights, of course, depends on how important each objective is for the society. In the above example, we can define the first objective function as the number of perpetrators correctly prosecuted and punished in a period of time. And the second objective function as the number of innocent people wrongfully prosecuted within that same period of time. Of course, the justice system is a complex one, and each case has several steps with their own likelihoods of success of failure. But for simplicity, let’s assume a system where either someone is prosecuted all the way to sentencing, or is not prosecuted at all.

Back to the example, one might consider a combined objective function that is simply the difference of the two individual objective functions. That is, prosecuting a true offender of laws is one positive point, but wrongfully punishing an innocent person is one negative point. So, if at the end of the period, the system punishes 900 true offenders and only 100 innocents, its score will be 800 (or its accuracy will be 90%), seemingly very high scores and something that the system should be proud of. But of course, giving equal weights to these two objectives is not the only possibility, and something that is not adopted by the justice systems in most modern societies.

The justice system of the United States established by Article III of the Constitution and further described at high level in the Bill of Rights, is incredible. I wish I had formal training in the history of the Constitution, or had read all the relevant parts in the Federalist Papers, to fully understand the thought process that went into establishing such a brilliant system of justice. But even with my limited knowledge in the subject, I can tell that the way the justice system in the United States has been established and defined, it not only does not give equal weights to the above two objective functions, but in fact regards minimizing the second objective function as being significantly more important than maximizing the first objective function. Take, for example, the provisions of the Fifth Amendment, establishing the rights for due process, and generally prohibiting the use of self-incriminating testimony. Obviously, the “due process” required by this amendment works as an impediment for a quick and dirty enforcement of the law, where a single officer can determine someone as being a criminal or offender of a law, and then decide on a detainment or other punishments for that person. The required due process may burden the system enough to let some perpetrators escape consequences. Or, not being able to use self-incriminating testimony can significantly hinder prosecutions, especially in cases where there is little or no other evidence. If the law enforcement officers could coerce suspects to provide testimonies or confessions, that would really help with such cases.

The fact that the Fifth Amendment prohibits certain methods or actions in upholding the laws, does not mean that the Framers did not care about ensuring successful prosecution of criminals; but that they cared more about not punishing innocents than punishing criminals. This is a very important, mostly philosophical, aspect of the United States justice system, and some may argue against it. But even the very harsh justice systems of authoritarian regimes do not usually claim to give equal weights to the above two objectives, and at least pretend to care more about protecting innocents than punishing criminals. In the US, with the very high bars for conviction, especially in the criminal cases, including unanimous verdict by a jury based on the very strict criterion of finding the evidence convincing beyond a reasonable doubt, leaves little room for second guessing which objective is more important for the justice system.

Unfortunately, the current administration does not seem to have a good understanding of the above notions. For example, when the border Tsar of the administration is asked about due process for the individuals that ICE accuses of being gang members and deports them to some Salvadorian gulag, his response, a typical example of whataboutism, is that whether the victim of a specific crime committed by an immigrant received due process before being murdered? Basically, he expresses that “murderers not respecting due process for their victims” justifies and gives permission to ICE to ignore the due process required by law from law enforcement and the justice system. Even worse, he practically places the law enforcement officers, in terms of the level of the expectations one should have from them, at the same level as murderers. Or when the Press Secretary of the Whitehouse is asked about innocent people that might have been wrongfully included among the deportees to El Salvador, she points to the fact that the administration has deported so many gang members. As if it is okay to wrongfully deport some innocents (practically sending some of them to death row), as long as you are deporting many gang members in the process.

Such ignorance or dismissal of basic human values is certainly depressing, but more importantly, the blatant disregard to the Constitution, the justice system, and the obligations of law enforcement and the executive branch is outright authoritarian.